With Republican Fred Thompson bowing out of the presidential race today, we figured we'd give our anonymous Staten Island Thompson supporter the final word on his man's troubled candidacy.

"He's the highest-touted Republican candidate to crash and burn since John Connally, Jack Kemp or Phil Gramm," he said. "When Fred finally got into the race, people expected this kind of messianic presence. I guess he could never meet those expectations. Of course, he was guilty of raising those expectations."

A darling of conservatives, Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee and onetime star of TV's "Law and Order," was slow getting into the race, and his lackadaisical campaign style never caught fire with GOP voters looking to be inspired.

"He came out of the gate so slow that by the time he started doing well, there was no clear path to victory," said our Republican.

It didn't help, he added, that conservatives and Christian evangelicals, tired of waiting for Godot perhaps, quickly gravitated to Mike Huckabee.

"Huckabee's emergence was clearly fatal to Thompson," said the Republican. "He grabbed the evangelicals and the Second Amendment voters."

And if his White House bid fails, it is now Huckabee who is seen as prime vice-presidential timber, a role that some envisioned for Thompson.

But our Republican doesn't see him as a match for too many other candidates.

"With John McCain, it'd be 'grumpy old men,'" he said. "With Huckabee [at the top of the ticket], you'd have two right-wing conservatives."

Mitt Romney might be another story, though.

"That might pacify some of the Christian conservatives who might be concerned about having a Mormon candidate," he said.